Oracle buys army vets’ big-data firm in $550m Israel shopping spree
Published April 15, 2016
(JTA) — Less than two months after buying an Israeli cloud services firm for approximately half a billion dollars, the American technology giant Oracle purchased another Israeli big data firm Crosswise for a reported $50 million.
Oracle, owned by Jewish entrepreneur Larry Ellison, announced the acquisition Thursday. Specific details of the deal were not released, but a source close to the company told The Times of Israel that the deal was in the “range of $50 million.”
Oracle said in a statement Thursday that it will integrate Crosswise’s technology into it’s data cloud, which it explained “ingests third-party data, extracts value, and activates the data to drive insights and harness this knowledge for targeting” to aid advertisers.
The Tel Aviv-based Crosswise specializes in cross-device marketing. It goes through over a petabyte (a million gigabytes) of data from billions of devices every month and identifies patterns in the way people use technology. Two of the company’s three co-founders, Jonathan Seidner and Ron Reiter, served in the Israeli army’s 8200 communications intelligence unit, acquiring skills they later implemented at Crosswire, according to their firm.
Crosswire’s CEO, Steven Glanz, a Harvard Law School graduate, set up the firm with his two partners in 2013, raising approximately $5 million for development, according to PC, an Israeli news site on technology. It has 20 employees.
Their firm’s acquisition is Oracle’s second major purchase this year in Israel, following the sale February sale of Ravello Systems, a firm which offers solutions for fast-working could services, for approximately half a billion dollars. Oracle said it would set up a cloud lab in Israel as part of that purchase.
Oracle has bought several other firms over the past few years, highlighting a desire to bolster its data cloud technology.
“The addition of Crosswise further broadens the Oracle ID Graph to construct a complete view of consumers’ digital interactions across multiple devices,” the company said in the statement.
